


all these half floors

by belantana



Category: Spooks
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 03:54:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belantana/pseuds/belantana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ruth dreams in circles. [ post-5.05 ]</p>
            </blockquote>





	all these half floors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unwoundfloors](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwoundfloors/gifts).



There is something glorious about the thought that she can never go back. It makes her reckless; giddy with the sudden weightlessness of her life. There is no reason, now, why she can't have all the things she had almost unconsciously accepted were not hers to have.

A family. Sunshine. A job that doesn't rip her heart and guts out every second week. Evenings and weekends.

She's happy here. Somehow the many halves of her life have come together in a small and perfect whole, warm like a stolen gem in her pocket. Or it's the old halves that have cracked and fallen away. The gentle quiet of the twilight here makes all her analogies clumsy.

She dreams in circles. Little glances in the corridor, fragments of conversation always on the edge of something, as if the two of them knew to position themselves heavy with metaphor. Rooftops, railings, hallways, always on the edge of something.

It is safe now, she thinks, to believe in this – now that she can never go back. She the exiled, the martyr. (She always had a romantic heart, after all.)

George asks her if she is happy and yes, she knows, she is. Happier than she ever could've would've should've been there. Her dreams run in circles, always in motion. Returning like the hands of a clock, hesitating, stuttering, rushing past again.

On the boat down the Thames, she didn't think of Tom, whom she idolises still, or Zoe, who is exiled too. She thought of Danny, who gave up his life for love, and not even the love was his own. There is a weakness in inevitability. This is the only way it could ever be, she thinks, and then she turns her ring around her knuckle and oh god please let it be the only way it could be.

All the layers of her life, in her dreams, glimpses of hallways and rooftops, the glow after the sun has set – always in motion, always circling back to the same point and past and back again.

She was always going to go back.

She even kept her name, so he could find her again.

.

[ title and fragments from massive attack's _mezzanine_ ]


End file.
